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September 2012

09/20/2012

I'm all for gay rights -- or LGBTQI rights as we're supposed to call gay right now. And that's not because "some of my best friends are gay," but because I think that gay rights are consistent with a human rights advocacy position of "all human rights for all." I don't think gay rights are conditional. But I do think they have to be fought for as a matter of law, not as a matter of tribal enforcement of authoritarianism.

Gay rights don't exist as full-fledged rights in national or international law. When we invoke them, we aren't invoking inherencies but trying to apply the notion of equality to gay persons and extend the "self-evident" nature of them. But gay rights are making progress, to be sure, and awareness continues to be raised. Under the Obama Administration, the US government has made gay equality a staple of its international human rights foreign policy, although Obama has not gone so far as to deman a federal gay rights law that would include marriage rights.

Unlike Rachel Maddow, who is on a poster with a quotation making the rounds of Facebook now, I don't believe that "rights are rights, you don't have to vote on them" because, well, they aren't. It would be nice if they were. It would be nice if there were awareness when the Constitution was drafted, and when Supreme Court decisions came later in the next centuries, that there was recognition that gay rights are equal rights. But just as rights for women and blacks took some decades in coming and had to be fought for, so do rights for gays. That's sad; it should happen faster; it should be self-evident like all the other truths held self-evident.

But it isn't, and I do not believe that the way to get it to be so is to become oppressive, coercive, and undermining of others' rights. Racial and gender equality didn't come by taking others' rights to free speech and association away -- those rights in fact are needed to right for all human rights for all. And I don't believe that gay rights will come about by taking away the rights of others antithetical to gays. The resulting society is one in which thuggishness and not the rule of law obtains. I'm against it.

As I wrote before at length, after a long time of thinking, I am really, really troubled by the aggressive, nasty, hateful, bullying tone of some elements of the gay rights struggle. I have experienced this up close and personal merely because I challenged the idea, promoted by Dan Savage, that if we recognize gay marriage rights, we also have to accept that marriage should mean promiscuity. I really don't see how one has to include the other, and it helps me realize that the gay marriage rights movement has elements of artifice and stealth -- it's really about another agenda for some, which should more properly be called "gay power" like "black power," Black Panther style, which involves crushing your enemies, even with violence, but certainly with harassment and boycotts and intimidation.

I wrote there about a lot of the people I see reluctant to sign off on gay rights and who even vote against them:

It's not that they are intolerant as much as that they fear the undermining of their own valuations and values by people antithetical to them. They feel they are getting a bad bargain -- a demand of tolerance from them for lifestyles they don't condone, but not a reciprocity of tolerance for their own choices.

There just doesn't seem to be an inherent awareness -- and validation and acceptance -- of the fact that other people get to have their views about traditional marriage; they get to advocate them; they get to spend money on organizations advocating them; those organizations get to lobby and advertise and hold events.

Unless you can actually show that any of this activity led to *discrimination* against gays, or actual coercion or violence, you don't have a case. This is America. The First Amendment holds. You can't silence people's views with the threat of state power.

That's disturbing for all of us, because it means that instead of achieving gay rights through affirmation of rights for all, it is involving taking away the free speech of some under coercion. That undermines freedom for all of us. It's wrong.

To be sure, the story is already being questioned, because the statement doesn't come from Chik-fila-A itself, but from the gay organization pressuring them to change. So it bears checking and we need to hear what the facts are here.

In Chicago, Obama's crony Rahm Emmanuel, who left the White House to become mayor, said that he would bar the restaurant chain from Chicago. That was really progs gone wild. It was bad enough that the engineered boycott of Chik-fil-A may have actually harmed their business; it was bad enough that the pressure of the hate campaign may have led to the Chik-fil-A VP for public relations dying of a heart attack. But now the power of public office was going to be used to curb speech and association. That's really frightening. A number of public figures, including even talk show hosts, weighed in with how wrong it was to bar a business from a municipality just for their views as expressed in the media.

Then what seems to have kicked in were some private negotiations, where the organized gay rights movement in Chicago, the Civil Rights Agenda, in conjunction with a sympathetic alderman, Proco "Joe" Moreno, somehow entered into talks or correspondence with Chik-fil-A. The chicken people have an ideology that their entire business can be a "Christian business" whereby everything they do can be devoted to God. They use the proceeds of their business for holding retreats on strengthening the family -- by which they mean the family as conceived as one man and one woman, and one woman under the man and one man under God.

But the main beef the organized gays had with the fast-food franchise was that the proceeds of their profits in this Christian business were going to anti-gay organizations. This aspect of the story was invoked again and again in forums, where people claimed not to be against free speech, but they *were* against funding organization that they said "wanted to take gays' rights from them."

Well, sorry, but free speech *does* including funding organizations that advocate views antithetical to yours. That's free and protected speech too. You can morally denounce it -- and of course that's being done with vigour and even hate and venom. And no, I'm not for taking *your* rights away and saying "you can't do that" or "you can't do just what they're doing" and denounce them, advocate for boycotts, hold actions, etc. etc. (within the law, i.e. I don't think you get to disrupt traffic and the use of the restaurant by other patrons in civil disobedience over this without consequences of arrest).

So what the Civil Rights Agenda did was enter into "months" of negotiations to try to browbeat Chik-fil-A -- under threat of having a Chicago official pull their business permit to open new restaurants on them! -- until finally, they got the executives of Chik-fil-A to write an internal memo affirming that they would ""treat every person with honor, dignity and respect-regardless of their beliefs, race, creed, sexual orientation and gender" in their restaurants and apparently cease funding "anti-gay" organizations. That part is unclear because we're not hearing it from Truett Cathy, the Chick-fil-A founder himself or any other chicken executives -- just from those pressuring them.

The story was consistent with another rumour in Huffpo that Dan Cathy, another executive in the family business, held some kind of "diversity" talks on the Duke University campus because Duke threatened not to renew their contract with the restaurant. It's likely that the Cathys simply practiced good business -- they are, after all, a business before they are an advocacy group -- and decided to meet and try to figure out what their antagonizers' beef was. No doubt they saw themselves as "clarifying" their position to show they weren't openly anti-gay as a matter of discrimination against restaurant patrons. Perhaps they conceded that they should get out of the "family" organization funding business because it was too controversial, and not consistent with their claim that they would stay out of the political arena, and let others pursue policy debates. Most likely it was business prudence -- the sort that boycotters always hope they can trigger -- that got Chik-Fil-A to decide to back off on some of their "traditional family" advocacy. It would be interesting to hear how they arrived at this position.

But they only arrived at it through force and business loss, and I don't view that as progress. It won't stick. It can and does cause backlash. And it doesn't strengthen the rule of law. Instead, it strengthens gangland style tactics to shakedown businesses that some groups in society don't like by taking away their rights.

And let me emphasize once again that my criticism of the gay movement's tactics and their politicking and even thuggishness on this, in cahoots with "progressive" elected officials, isn't taking away their right to advocate as they do. It's not denying them the right to practice such tactics consistent with the First Amendment. It's about morally calling out their coerciveness and pointing out that it leads to sham victories and doesn't strengthen in the end all human rights for all.

Every time you criticize the left's take on anything these days, they immediately petulantly claim you are "taking away their free speech". Huh? They're the ones taking away free speech, and I'm not advocating taking theirs away. They can have boycotts; they can shriek and holler on social media; they can sic their elected officials on hated fast food outfits to their hearts' content. But I can also call out the moral dubiousness of these tactics as well.

I saw that David Badash at the blog New Civil Rights was taking on the next round in this debate. Interestingly, Badash is the same blogger who took on Dan Savage's views of open marriage as ill-advised at a time when the gay rights movement was trying to make progress on marriage rights in many states. I had "liked" that article when linked by a former friend on Facebook, and had then faced a tidal wave of hate from the fuck-you hedonist gay set who want to thuggishly silence anyone who opposes them with bullying.

Yet I was disappointed to see that Badash, who seems sane and thoughtful, took the path that so many progs are taking these days of "factology" and "illustrating how everyone got the facts wrong".

I was eager to see what exactly he came up with in that "op research" approach, and read it very carefully. But I didn't see any of the facts of the media wrong, and I didn't change my position, shared by CNN journalists as well as all kinds of public figures chastizing the gay movement for implying Chik-fil-A can't have free speech and is to be punished by blocking of their business permits over their beliefs as expressed. If the liberal consensus that holds this country's freedoms together really prevailed, the Chicago and Boston officials would back off and give Chik-fil-A their permits and merely watch to see if they really had a genuine discrimination case. Citizens would be free not to patronage them. Yet something different is happening, not good for rights in general.

Badash gets away from the immediate problem of Truett Cathy's First Amendment rights by re-focusong on what is seen as a more ominous problem with Chik-Fil-A: the anti-gay organizations they fund which are viewed as actively advocating discrimination against gays. He even implies that the restaurant itself has discrimated against gays, but his reporting then gets vague. He digs up the fact that since 1988, the chain had 12 discrimination cases. Really, David? That's all? That's a very small number for any large business with tens of thousands of employees. We don't even know if these are about gay rights at all; they could be about gender or racial discrimination. And we don't even know if they are accurate; disgruntled employees play the politically-correct card of claiming discrimination, and maybe they're wrong. If there's a case, bring it. I don't see it.

Should Chik-fil-A be able to reject gay employees due to its founders' views against gay marriage? It would seem the law would not allow them to do that, because they are a business, and not a private club. The courts ruled in favour of the Boy Scouts of America, saying that they have the right to bar gays from their ranks as a matter of freedom of assocation -- that right isn't trumped by freedom of expression. But they might not hold the same notion under most municipalities' jurisprudence on labor law. This is admittedly a fine line and it would have to be tested in court. So far I don't see the smoking gun David Badash does.

But his real complaint, as with other gay advocates, is about the even more conservative outfits that WinShape, their philanthropical arm, supports.

I took a careful look at all the organizations he was complaining about. Naturally, I don't support any of them. But supporting them with speech and money isn't an offense, and is protected activity under the First Amendment.

Exodus International and other groups that advocate that you can make people drop their gayness through therapy or religious experience seem silly when they aren't horrifying. Exodus seems to self-discredit by the fact that two of their founders who claimed to be de-gayified then dropped out and lived with each other until one died of AIDS. The current leadership seems to have to do some tap-dancing to explain how they don't believe in fact gays can be "converted" with overnight miracles as they once claimed. They don't seem to be backing off from their recruitment of gays back to the straight world -- which is folly -- but I don't see any evidence that they use coercion. I don't see them holding people against their will with cult-like techniques. People seem to leave them freely. And under the First Amendment and other Constitutional rights, *they get to have these programs*. They are lawful. They are obnoxious and even sickening. Why go against people's actual natures? But unless you can show they've broken a law, you cannot undermine their basic rights. They are the same basic rights you need to stand on.

I recall on a forum somebody claimed wildly to me that one of the organizations that Chik-fil-A supports was for "exporting gays from the US". Gosh, that sounded awful. Export? Really, guys? Like round up and deport? Even if they are citizens? How? To where?

It turned out that what *that* meant was that some of these traditional family groups advocated against allowing the partners of gays or the spouses of gays married in other countries that recognize gay marriage at the national level to obtain immigration status. Well, if there isn't a federal law acknowledging gay marriage, then that right can't be extended to immigrants. This is pretty much of an edge case, of course and fairly contrived -- what, gay couples married in Norway are going to immigrate to the US and one of them isn't going to be accepted? Could we look at some actual cases, please?

It may seem harsh, but if you don't have gay rights, you don't have the extensions of gay rights that are implied in laws on immigration, and you have to fight for them, not accuse people who advocate against them falsely that they are for murder and deportation. If you think you achieve something by browbeating and shaming them, you don't. And you don't have a case.

Badash mentions another group, the SPLC:

The intention is to denigrate LGBT people in its battles against same-sex marriage, hate crimes laws, anti-bullying programs and the repeal of the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy.

To make the case that the LGBT community is a threat to American society, the FRC employs a number of “policy experts” whose “research” has allowed the FRC to be extremely active politically in shaping public debate. Its research fellows and leaders often testify before Congress and appear in the mainstream media. It also works at the grassroots level, conducting outreach to pastors in an effort to “transform the culture.”

That all sounds scary and ominous, but the reality is, its protected, lawful speech and activity. They may advocate these awful backward things, but your case against them -- that we must silence them and even boycott or refuse to give permits to their business -- is pretty much undermined by the fact that they don't have an effect. Obama repealed "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" and replaced it with a policy allowing gays in the military. Some gays have even been married on some military bases. Good!

If you don't want LGBT to be viewed as a "threat to American society" -- its freedoms, its rights -- then don't undermine those freedoms and rights, extend them instead. That's what the president did.

Another wild claim on forums involved Uganda, and statements that these groups backed the killing of gays. I looked at the various websites and again, found this a wild exaggeration. They just didn't support Congressional action or a State Department policy supporting gays in Uganda or protesting their murder. That's reprehensible -- they should get behind such statements of basic human rights. But again, it's their First Amendment right to advocate against such bills, and advocating against the acknowledgement of gay rights that they imply, and pointing out that those gay rights don't exist, isn't advocating murder, or even "incitement to imminent violence". It's saying that they advocate against gay rights. They get to do that. Stop trying to take away their rights; they are your own rights.

In making his deeper case against Chik-fil-A based on not just public statements but groups they fund, Badash concludes by saying the lion's share of their funding goes to their own programs, and then cites their core message:

“What would happen if companies developed effective practices and
benefits to grow the relational wellness of their employees; the faith
community delivered stronger marriage and family ministries; great media
with a winsome, honest message to the culture about marriage and the
family saturated our cities; marriage and family service providers
collaborated to share their expertise in producing a new generation of
amazing resources and services; and city leaders and elders took
responsibility for overlapping these efforts within their own community?
We believe that a renaissance of marriage and family in America would
take place!”

Sorry, but there's nothing wrong with this statement as such, although the smarmy Bible smugness is offensive. It's not only about the First Amendment, which this doesn't cross; it's about a conflation of the idea that support for traditional marriage equals anti-gay activity. The gay rights movement is on shaky ground when they make this shrill and unfounded claim. And even if it is anti-gay, it is protected speech and association, and the way to fight it is not through challenging those rights.

Badash seems to imply that if the chicken people succeed in their dreams, and "saturate" America, they will fill a civil space so full of born-again traditional family types antithetical to the gay lifestyle that they will pose a threat to gay freedom. If that "winsome" messaging succeeds, the world will be filled with 1950s heterogenous church-going couples making jello surprises.

But that's ludicruous. It's just a chicken restaurant. It's just one non-profit advocacy group among many. The concerted power of all the gay nonprofits likely dwarf the conservative groups they oppose. There is no danger that born-again style Christian values are going to prevail in the major urban areas of America, or even in many lesser backwaters. Yeah, I get it about the "red belt" or the "Bible belt." But do you REAALY think you will win those people over by saying they all must be brow-beaten out of their views and their charities of choice by Shakedown Street from the organized gay mafia?

Because that's what it sounds like. It sounds exactly like the sort of thing the Rev. Jesse Jackson and his cronies did in the 1980s, so perfectly exposed by the liberal New Yorker. They would start a boycott against a company claiming it discriminated against blacks, and perhaps it didn't truly have many blacks on staff. Then they would offer to "resolve" the problem by having some "training" and some consultants come in to do sensitivity sessions with executives. This, of course, would cost a lot of money, and Jackson's consulting companies would make a fortune. I find this appalling, because instead of regulating by law, and claiming rights by law, it implies that you can gain privileges by paying tribute to the right people. It's wrong. It undermines the rule of law.

Now the argument might come: But what if the chicken people really were threatening to take over the civic space? At what point do you stop conceding that people have their free speech rights and say now they are so encroaching that they take away yours?

Well, you do that when you have an actual case. And you don't. What you have is the opposite. Chicago alderman making a deal with a gay rights lobby to let in the much-harassed restaurant if they back down from the exercise of their rights. You have Emmanuel talking about "Chicago values" and not rights, although there isn't anything in the Constitution called "Chicago values," so it really becomes something that's gangland style -- achieved by coercion. The job of the movement should be to fight for rights and persuade people who are doubtful or hostile that gays deserve equality like any other human beings -- by showing indeed they are like any other human beings. That demands the same kind of reason that is expected of people asked to change -- and not coercion, and not withdrawal of rights.

Badash jumps from the Chik-Fil-A's statement "“You can’t expect people to do well in their business if they’ve got problems at home" to implying that he has made an anti-gay statement by saying "You also can’t expect people to do well in their business if they know
their boss disagrees with the very essence of their being, and is
willing to publicly state they would fire them for being gay" -- but without any linkage whatsoever. Advocating for traditional marriage and advocating even against gay rights explicitly (which these conservative groups don't do in the way implied) isn't the same thing as firing a gay employee.

If there is a case, please come up with it. There isn't. And if a gay person knowingly goes to Chik-fil-A to get a job there and broadcast his lifestyle to get in their face as an experiment, he's going to pick a contrived fight. He's not Rosa Parks on a public bus. He's making a private decision to go work in a private company where he doesn't have to work because it isn't the only job in town.

Another case took place recently in Canada, which tends to have the ability to be more politically-correct than the US because there is less of a private sector there and many more people working for the government or funded by the government. The government funds more things and has more power to force its views subtly or not. In this case, an Hispanic ball player on a baseball team had painted some anti-gay slurs under eyes that were visible during the game. It amounted to saying to the rival team, "You're faggots". This was indeed offense and a baseball team, which is a public institution that is supposed to be about good sportsmanship and fair play, shouldn't allow it, regardless of any free speech norms in Canada or anywhere. The players are looked to as role models especially for children and should be expected to comport themselves decently. It's not decent to paint that kind of slur. In fact, any kind of banner about anything in the eye paint seems out of line.

So what was this fellow's punishment for not realizing the environment he was in was not supportive of Latin American machismo and rampant Latino anti-gay sentiment -- or even the casual insults that the modern youth indulges in almost as an instinctual rebellion against their years of politically-correct training? He is to be benched for three games, and his pay is to go to a gay rights' organization, and he is to undergo sensitivity training. Some consultants will pocket the fee; the groups will be gleeful at their windfall. Instead of a rights-based approach, we have tribal bribery.

I find this truly appalling -- because it's not about gay rights, it's not about rights for us all, it's about an excessively punitive approach that does not achieve rights, but only achieves intimidation. Do we really think this ball player will emerge after his docked pay and his "sensitivity training" transformed and loving of gay people? Will he not simmer with resentment and will not scores of his fellow players -- and fans -- feel as if they've been on Shakedown Street?

09/18/2012

See that? That's my "political compass," which puts me in the lower left quadrant in the left-of-center, libertarian block.

I'm a registered Democrat; I just voted in the Democratic primaries
in my city for a Democrat for my assemblyman and other Democrats for
state senators -- I chose the ones that were for affordable housing, or
women's health, or against fracking in upstate. The guy I voted for is for LGBT rights, and even public health care.
I don't have insurance and just checking again, I found that it would
cost me $415 a month with a $10,000/year deductible, or $2500 a month
for a family of three even with the cheapest company.

On most of the issues that the Political Compass deals with, I'm
aligned with the lefties, radicals, and libertarian extremists at
Sluniverse.com, for example. I'm four-square for gay rights and gay
marriage, with no conditions. I personally oppose abortion, but I
recognize it as the law of the land and a choice for others without my
beliefs. Public health care doesn't scare me -- I studied in Canada and
Russia -- but I'm critical.

There are things that just don't show up on this Compass that
encompass my beliefs that don't align with the Shariaites at Slun -- I
oppose the state mandating companies to offer birth control and
abortion-inducers in their health insurance and I think Sandra Fluke is a
grand-standing contrived edge-case. There is no need to make the
government pay for your birth control in the first place; in the second
place, there is no need to make the Jesuits pay for it. Go down the
street to Planned Parenthood, also state funded, and pick up your IUD or
pills there. That's all! And keep the government out of people's
beliefs. No, the Catholic institutions *do* get to keep state funding
*even if* they don't agree about this induced abortion policy -- because
otherwise, every faith would have to meet a test for every single
secular belief of the "progressive" state and others wouldn't pass on
other things, and the loss to separation of church and state would be
grave.

I'm for gay marriage -- but what I can't express on that chart is
that I'm not for boycotts of businesses and people who don't share these
views. They get to have their traditional views. That's their right,
both to freedom of religion and freedom of expression under the First
Amendment. In other words, I'm libertarian on this score -- I'm all for
First Amendment rights, and that means not coercing people by the state
-- as officials in Chicago and Boston have done by saying they won't
issue business permits on the basis of a belief or practice.

I'm a human rights activist, and my views about the Health &
Human Services birth control issue, and about the disgraceful and
aggressive boycotts and heckling and harassment of Komen (which for a
time opposed abortion funding of sub-grantee Planned Parenthood), and
chick-fil-A, a business ran by a man who favours traditional marriage
between a man and a women is that they are antithetical to human rights.
If your VP for public relations has a heart attack and dies over public
bullying; if you livelihood is threatened due to boycotts not over any
documented actual discrimination against gays, but a viewpoint in favour
of traditional marriage, what kind of freedom of speech do you have?
You don't.

The left and the libertarian right has no concept of pluralism -- a
world in which all the squares on that grid get to co-exist and live and
have their being, freely and fully, without being brow-beaten,
harassed, coerced, silence by threats to their livelihood or business or
even safety.

The people on Sluniverse don't share this rights-based perspective,
because they are happy to first heckle and harass, then mute, then ban
anyone who disagrees with their rigid, shrill, sanctimonious
"progressive" take on the issues.

I'm not a Republican, and I've never voted Republican for a president
in my life. I usually vote straight-ticket Democrat; I voted for
Governor Pataki after 9/11. I've even voted for Green Party members. I
loathe Ayn Rand. I find her merely a mirror-image of the Bolsheviks she
opposed, with the same rigidity and harshness and utopianism gone awry
-- just like the people of this popular SL forum, in fact, their
anonymity amplifying their unreasonably lunacy.

I don't like Sarah Palin, I don't drive an SUV, I don't watch Fox
News or even have a TV; I don't shop at Wal-mart, although if I get the
opportunity when out of state, I will. In other words, all the things
always said of me are bullshit, but I don't care.

The point is, that even with my stellar credentials over the years of
voting Democrat, embracing all rights, including LGBT and what are
euphemistically called "reproductive rights," even with my social and
ecological awareness, I'm voting for a Republican.

I don't like some of Romney's views -- I'm dead against his take on gay marriage. But when I watch this video spread as agitprop by moveon.org,
surprisingly, I remain a Romney voter. Why? Because while I exactly
believe what this gay veteran said -- "Why the hell" can't he have equal
rights and death benefits from a partner killed in action, for example
-- I find that Romney comes across as calm, truthful, and sincere, and
Moveon.org's mascot comes across as contrived and politicized. He tells
us he is gay, but we don't know if he has a gay partner in the military,
or whether that's an edge case. He's right that he should have these
rights to marriage and benefits -- and he'll have to fight to have them
in his state. I'm happy my state has these rights to marriage, although
benefits from the military are not available yet.

Romney simply comes across as so much more sincere and straight than
Obama ever does, that there's no question of my choice, even with a
diametrical disagreement with him on this lifestyle issue.

Why? Because I don't think presidents belong in our sex lives anyway,
and that eventually, in time, we will have gay marriage rights
everywhere. The president will not roll back abortion or gay rights,
such as they are, on his term, as he will be preoccupied with other
things. These matters are being decided by states -- work on your state
politicians and stop endlessly obsessing on these issues in national
elections. They are merely deliberately trolled and contrived to try to
keep in power a stealth-socialist president and his cronies. No thanks!

I don't think for one goddamn minute that any Republican is going to
take away the right of any woman to have sex when and with whom she
wishes; to use birthcontrol; and to avail herself of a timely abortion.
Not one minute. The entire charade is contrived and manipulated, and
seems fiendishly to distract from the real conservatives of the world
taking away women's rights in Iran, Afghanistan, Sudan, and even all
these celebrated hearths of the Arab Spring like Tunisia and Egypt.

Because the Political Compass, even if it puts you down in the left
quadrant, doesn't enable you to express your opposition to socialism and
communism. It doesn't enable you to say that no, you don't think
communism is a good idea just never implemented properly. It doesn't
enable you to say that no, you don't think state health care or care for
the poor or public education are socialism -- if they aren't coercive
(like forcing you to pay a fine if you don't sign up) or harshly
redistributive (i.e. not means-tested).Why isn't Obama's health care
plan for the nation like those already in place in the states like
ChildHealthcare Plus -- a) non-coercive b) means-tested?

There
are no nuances on the Compass, which was in any event devised by
lefties for sure, so as to avoid explosing their authoritarianism and
where they'd *really* be on the square if we could get all the answers
honestly.

If there were questions that asked whether the makers of the hateful
anti-Muslim video should be arrested or have the video pulled, there'd
be many "progressives" who would say "yes" -- and that should move them
up in that authoritarian quadrant. If there were a question that asked
whether people who criticized gays, expressed contempt to gays, or
espoused traditional marriage from public positions should be sanctioned
in some way, the "progressives" would answer "yes" -- and rightly move
into the authoritarian quadrant. If there was a question that asked
whether the stock market should be closed and the investors arrested, in
keeping with Occupy Wall Street's demands, there would be
"progressives" who said yes -- and then should move into the
authoritarian part of the quadrant, as they are against free enterprise
and freedom of association. And so on. But the square doesn't expose
authoritarianism -- really -- except from the right.

The worst thing about all these people is in every argument, when
they are challenged, or even bested, they whine that you are trying to
take away their right to freedom of expression. That's appallingly
outrageous. What they do in fact is try to place a politically-correct
chill over expression -- and this puny whimper that they are somehow
"victimized" because you refuse to be coerced into agreeing with them,
is itself a violation of free debate.

Again, these people have no vision of pluralism, where people in
different camps in fact remain in them; where views are not changed;
where the clash of perspectives is perpetuated forever, and
understandably so, given different interest groups.

This week, we've been treated to an outrageous spectacle of the left
indulging in the kowtowing of essentially calling for a blasphemy law in
the United States and the world -- just like the Islamists. They want
to silence Romney's critique of Obama's handling of the Middle East
crisis, and want to make this the watershed for his failed campaign.
Nonsense. I'm with James Kirchick all the way on this on Index on
Censorship. The timing of the Cairo message isn't the issue; whether you
pre-emptively apologize to potential raging mobs for hurting their
feelings, or apologize after they've already killed our ambassador,
you're still apologing, and it *is* indeed an apology to over-empathize
with hurt feelings of people who justify murder with their insult.

And there's no space on the square to again, affirm that what we need
is more debate and more frank talk and more exposure of these bad
decisions, not less -- we don't have a blasphemy law that says "no
criticizing the president in times of national crisis".

It's precisely because I tend to care most about foreign policy, as
it's always been related to my occupation, that I chose Romney over
Obama. Romney isn't terrific and he seems to have something to learn.
But I know he has some good advisors and his instincts, far from seeming
awkward to me, are right on target. Russia *is* our enemy -- that I can
attest to, personally. The Kremlin made us its enemy, and we have to
return the favour. This is a country whose generals called for a missile
strike against us if we deploy defense against Iran. Iran! Iran --
against whom Moscow won't make sanctions because it would harm their
banking business, as they say frankly and directly in the glare of a
summit with Hillary.

I could go on and on about foreign policy failures in the Obama
Administration but I've written a lot on my other blogs and don't want
to take the time now. The 2009 Cairo speech was an unnecessary
capitulation and dangerous rejection of human rights principles, and the
capitulation has continued and we see the results.

What worries me even more than Obama -- who is forced to govern more
towards the center -- are the Obama supporters among rigid, shrill,
ideological "progressives" who gain so much strength and funding from
Obama being in power. If he comes back for another four years, all sorts
of bad things will continue to happen -- bills like SOPA, dealing with
copyright and security will be defeated. Bradley Manning may be pardoned
-- a terrible setback for our security and for the legitimate meaning
of classified diplomacy in a liberal democratic government -- and a
dangerous backing of those who persecuted the WikiLeaks sources and
harmed them -- and harmed them most certainly, even if this isn't
trumpeted from every web site so as not to paint further tarets on their
back. Tyrants in Iran, Russia, Sudan, China will gain more purchase on
international affairs -- and they are responsible for allowing most of
the world's killing in Syria and many other places.

The coerciveness of the health and social and lifestyle issues will
continue, and that's scary, as it will lead to more backlash from the
right. I was reading about Putin's cult-of-personality antics today, his
flying with the cranes, and the firing of Masha Gessen, an editor who
refused to send a reporter to cover his vanity stunt. He summoned the
journalist and the editor and tried to explain why he took part in these
charades, and even suggested the reporter shouldn't be fired. She
declined to accept what amounted to a Kremlin re-appointment -- good for
her.

But in watching all this, I was reminded of somebody. That somebody
was Obama. He is Putin-like in his intrusion into the private sector and
the civil and political issues. When the president uses his power of
office to tell someone defying the Jesuits' wish not to fund her birth
control (!) and makes a celebrity and demonstrative model of her, this
is coercion for all of us. Where can we turn? When the US government --
president, secretary of state, generals -- tell idiots burning Korans
not to do this, or even condemn a hateful video, they are using the
power of their official state positions to curb speech, like it or not.
The solution to bad speech in this country has always been to supply
more good speech -- not to have the president come out and thunder
against bad speech. Few people would keep burning a Koran after a
general calls them and makes them responsible for deaths overseas -- but
in fact the general should make responsible those who demonstrate
violently and police who kill demonstrators. They're the problem, not
some American loon.

The left has become so harsh, coercive, shrill, amplified, obnoxious,
and so interfering with the rights of others that it's becoming scary.
Imagine, like base and common KGB agents, setting up a system with
"flag@whitehouse.gov" to report on your neighbour if his blog is out of
line with the president's views. Calling everybody a "liar" if they
simply don't interpret the same set of data as you. Endlessly
"fact-checking" every little thing in the most tendentious and trolling
manner.

Implying that there is a sole scientific truth somewhere, accessible
to those of "progressive" tilt. Awful! My vote for Romney is about
reversing this tilt, and chastising Democrats who have to straighten up
and put back somebody like the Clintons as their leader. Hillary
Clinton's speech at Eid-al-Fitr in fact sounded the right notes -- she
said what so many people have said in their blogs and news comments:
Christians, Jews, Buddhists don't go on violent rampages when they are
insulted. Nothing justifies violence. But it took Romney's probing
statements to shake the Obama Administration to saying just that finally
-- when they should have opened with it.

I feel as if we have a surrogate politics now -- mediated through the miasma of the metaverse on Twitter and Facebook and Internet TV shows. A story isn't what is real, but this shrill, hortatory desire of the left to try to bring into real being that which remains virtual -- their hope of some huge shaming of Romney, that good church boy, their hope of some exposure of his commission of some *blasphemy* of our day.

The idea that his statement of the obvious -- that the messaging on the Middle East was apologetic and capitulated to violent mobs; or that 47% of the people voting for Obama are dependent on the government -- or believe in dependency as a goal -- the idea that these are some outrages, some blasphemies, is preposterous. They're simply the truth. The country will be very split on these elections, maybe right down the middle as we were in 2000, and the Obama team had better hope they come up with some chads.

Because some of the 47% will cross over -- we were lost to the Democrats because they went too far. Preposterously, some twitterer told me that I "couldn't" be in the 47% if I was voting for Romney. but that's just it...the literalism of the gotcha gang fails to see that these class warfare categories -- that low-salaried people who might have an Earned Income Tax Credit or reduce school lunches are going to vote for Obama -- are misleading. Some aren't. I'm not.

Scrape away the left's obsession with their sexual freedoms -- which aren't threatened -- and their myopia about where it really is -- along with all women's rights and freedom of speech -- in the Middle East! -- and what do you have of the Romney critique?

Not much. As I've said time and again: win the cultural wars, lose the elections. Have your fun with this incessant ridicule, this constant "gotcha" gamification, and incantation about things you hope to will into being by Twitter. Then face the music: you lost us.

State Department spokesperson Victoria Nuland told reporters at the news briefing September 14 that until an FBI investigation was complete, no more comments would be made on the events in Benghazi, Libya where our ambassador and three Embassy staff people were killed:

I am going to frustrate all of you infinitely by telling you that now that we have an open FBI investigation on the death of these four Americans, we are not going to be in a position to talk at all about what the U.S. Government may or may not be learning about how any of this happened – not who they were, not how they happened, not what happened to Ambassador Stevens, not any of it – until the Justice Department is ready to talk about the investigation that it’s got. So I’m going to send you to the FBI on any of those kinds of questions, and they’re probably not going to talk to you about them while the investigation is open.

When a reporter asked, "Are you saying now that if there is something wrong with what was given out as correct information, it’s not going to be corrected because of the investigation...?" -- Nuland responded, ""I will make a personal pledge to you that if I become aware that information we gave that first night is radically wrong in a way that you deserve to know, I will do my best to get that information to you. But I have to respect the fact that this is now a crime scene."

Having closed of journalistic inquiry -- although of course some bloggers will continue to ask questions -- the Administration is now filling the gap with a key version of the story that may not be true: that the attacks were spontaneous, and not organized.

Today, Amb. Susan Rice said definitively -- before the FBI investigation was completed -- that the attacks were not premeditated. She then elaborated to the extent that we come back to... finding it was premeditated -- just by different people:

"We believe that folks in Benghazi, a small number of people came to the embassy to - or to the consulate, rather, to replicate the sort of challenge that was posed in Cairo," Rice said. "And then as that unfolded, it seems to have been hijacked, let us say, by some individual clusters of extremists who came with heavier weapons… And it then evolved from there."

As Jake Tapper of ABC reports reports, this is in direct contradiction to what Libyan President Mohamed Magariaf is saying: "It was planned, definitely, it was planned by foreigners, by people who entered the country a few months ago, and they were planning this criminal act since their arrival," told CBS News.

I'm hardly persuaded by this claim because the battle against Qaddafi was long and hard and his supporters could remain. Qaddafi was reported to cooperate with Al Qaeda and recruit suicide bombers for Iraq and that connection could still be in place. Of course, the rebels have always rejected the idea that Al Qaeda was behind anything in Libya, because it was discredited their authentic uprising, but there's no need for us to accept these narratives as all-encompassing truths. Interestingly, Firedoglake took Malinowski's claim about the Libyan government's distractive claims to indicate the attack was pre-planned -- now that this notion is being spun by the Obama Administration, will FDL change its line, too?

In fact, it's a deadly miscalculation to believe that there were only pure democrats fighting for freedom, they won, and now there are no more forces lurking around to undo it, whether fellow rebels with a beef, Qaddafi supporters, Al Qaeda agents or otherwise. There are forces that have killed our diplomats! We need to keep an open mind on examining this situation and not adopt the arrogant scorn of the Beltway on analyzing these events.

I can see why the Administration has immediately become wedded to the "spontaneity" idea -- because if were a planned attack, then that would mean they might have done more to prevent it. A lot of focus has gone on the lightly-guarded US compound without any US marines, but Nuland is right that for a consulate outside the capital, this might have been "normal" enough, although the sense that it was a "rebel-held" capital might have added to the false sense of a lack of threat.

Amb. Rice, in articulating the line as it has likely come in cables, is conceding that behind the spontanteous outbursts were those who "hijacked" what is implied as an angry but non-violent or at least non-lethal - demonstration. But hijacking takes planning...

And one indication we have about something being very wrong in this situation comes, from all places, the game chat of Sean Smith in the hours before his death. As every news article and obiturary has noted, Sean was an avid player of EVE Online. EVE is an intricate game of strategy and deceit whose developer once said with a twinkle in his eye at a conference I attended at New York Law School on virtual worlds and games, "We make fraud fun."

EVE Online is intensively demanding and difficult and a notorious time-suck and even cult. And interestingly, it's the only online game or world where a players' council that interacts in a form of democracy with the game developers has actually worked successfully. Sean Smith, known as "Vile Rat" in the game and also playing the role of a diplomat for his Goonswarm alliance, was on that council. He also attended the Fanfest or gamers' convention for EVE -- that shows he was even more heavily involved in this intensive community than the typically obsessed player.

My first question -- one asked only by a few other people on various forums, and always only by women -- is why Sean Smith was playing EVE online or at least chatting to EVE buddies at work -- even if not during work hours -- and chatting about security matters.

You cannot possibly know who is in those games as the avatars are all anonymous. And speaking of Anonymous, many of them got their start on the Something Awful forums where Sean was a moderator.

People are loathe to ask these questions in the shock of the news of our fallen heroes, and I totally understand that, but it is a question that inspectors have to ask. The FBI must get his game chat transcripts from EVE or from Jabber or Skype as they are matters of national security.

What stood out chillingly for me are the last words of Sean on September 11, 2012 as recorded by his EVE buddy The Mittani, which he and his fellow EVE mates seem only to evaluate on the level of a marker for being in a dangerous situation:

(12:54:09 PM) vile_rat: assuming we don't die tonight. We saw one of our 'police' that guard the compound taking pictures

But what this line tells us, for anyone familiar with embassies and consulates abroad, is that Sean Smith did not feel as if he could trust the Libyans guarding him. He used the word "police" in scare quotes. He apparently didn't believe they were acting like real police. That could mean they were incompetent, or that he couldn't be sure they were on the right side -- and I think probably the latter.

And that's because in the next phrase, he said they were taking pictures. Why were people guarding a compound stopping and taking pictures of that compound -- oh, like Iranian spies caught taking pictures of the Midtown Tunnel or something?

Could it be because they were helping those who were later coming to attack the compound in a planned attack by showing them the layout of buildings? Could this seemingly simple game chat from Vile Rat with his game buddy contain a clue of a planned attack.

Are those Libyan guards being interrogated and are any of them under arrest?

Of course, they could have been taking pictures like tourists or trying out their new Instagram apps. But it's more likely they were taking them for a purpose -- a purpose that stood out for Sean and made him comment -- and it was part of the uneasy signals from his environment that made Sean Smith say "assuming we don't die tonight."

The way the news stories went, it seemed as if he typed that line in chat, then typed "FUCK GUNFIRE" in the next line and was never heard from again.

I got the idea that all these chat lines came later at night, right before the attack -- at 9:30 pm or 10:00 pm. But the game chat is time-stamped 12:54:09 PM. Is that the time-stamp of a game player located in the US? Or Iceland? Tripoli is two hours ahead of Reykjavik, the capital of Iceland, where EVE online's company is located. Games are often set to the time of their physical developers' locations. That means when it is 12:54 pm in Reykjavik, it is 2:54 pm in Tripoli, or about 7 hours before the 10 pm attack. Game time could be irrelevant here, however, if the two men were only chatting on Jabber, a chat program for game fans to use outside the game itself.

He was on jabber when it happened, that’s the most fucked up thing. In Baghdad the same kind of thing happened - incoming sirens, he’d vanish, we’d freak out and he’d come back ok after a bit. This time he said ‘FUCK’ and ‘GUNFIRE’ and then disconnected and never returned.

When?

It seems likely that if Sean heard gunfire, it must have been right at the moment of the attack? Or was there any gunfire earlier in the day?

@j_smedley I'm afraid that when we find out the details of what happened we will become blind with rage. How many guards did they have?

Indeed.

So Sean could have been chatting on his lunch hour or after hours late in the evening - and not necessarily intensively playing the game that in fact he had somewhat withdrawn from, as he stepped down from the players' council in EVE's star chambers. He could have Jabber tabbed out in one window while he multi-tasked.

The question is why, if he saw the Libyan guards acting strangely, as information officer, he didn't alert the department of security, or even send a cable to Washington. But an information officer's duties even in this war setting, and even as a former military man, would not necessarily include reporting on the scene and its worrisome factors, when the job duties were more about making statements of US policy and news of the post's activities.

It sounds like a fantastic science fiction novel, doesn't it? A third-rate hate video gets uploaded and has help going "viral" and gets rebroadcast on powerful and influential Egyptian TV, and it ends in the death of a gamer who is a virtual diplomat in a world of shifting and treacherous alliances in a grim outer space. Nobody wants to blame the Internet for anything. They could this time.

It's clear that Sean Smith was inured to danger, and his game buddies even bragged about how he told them of his dangerous assignments, which added to his allure -- it's typical in these anonymous virtual scenes that people use the coin of real life or "RL" as it is known to trump game-acquired skills and amplify them. Through the acceleration and amplification of virtuality, somebody who is an information officer can become Kissinger or Brahimi.

Sean was a hero for accepting this dangerous assignment and walking into harm's way to help both his country and the Libyan people. He was a military man skilled in assessing situations. So we need to take his seasoned instincts seriously, and ask why Sean wrote negatively of those Libyan police, and why and what else he saw. But we also have to ask why he discussed this so casually with a game buddy, and why he reported it in chat or in a game, but not to the security in his compound.

Of course, I'll be the first to say this is a rather obscure line of inquiry, when you also have American and Libyan eyewitnesses in real life, ballistics reports, fire department and police reports, and everything else that the FBI is now looking at.

But I'm not liking the left's effort to chill any debate around this national tragedy that occurred, truly as if planned, on September 11, exploiting the good will and active participation of dedicated foreign service officers, Amb. Chris Stevens and his staff.

As if they participate in some heavily ritualistic religion that forbids ever speaking of the dead or criticizing national leaders when deaths have occurred abroad, Obama administration officials and their avid supporters in the press and blogosphere have been scolding Romney and any others raising questions as if they've committed, well, blasphemy.

Nonsense. When Americans die abroad in this brutal and startling away right in their supposedly untouchable consulate, truly we need to ask questions, and the president and his foreign policy record aren't off limits. When statements like the US Embassy made in Cairo are coming out to supposedly "manage" the situation, and don't work and a conflagration occurs, indeed we do get to ask about the entire Middle Eastern policy of Obama and how he has handled the Arab Spring -- which has, in fact, since 2009 in the Cairo speech, but a question of accentuating guilt, exhibiting deference to unpredictable forces, and scant on human rights universals.

Photo by Matt McDermott of the Brooklyn Bridge occupation, October 1, 2011. McDermott is one of many demonstrators pushing the line that demonstrators were "lured" although his own photos and captions document how they went into the road deliberately. He styles the "backing up" of the police as a lure, when in fact it's merely a positioning when faced with a large crowd disobeying direct orders not to go on the bridge -- period. Biased activists like McDermott can never explain why these marchers went off their route in the first place and stormed the bridge.

I can see absolutely no reason why these records shouldn't be turned over. These aren't private messages, these are the public tweets of a demonstrator defiantly marching on the Brooklyn Bridge, bragging about his civil disobedience on Twitter and expecting no consequences, and it is absolutely material to the case. The judge wants to show that in fact this alibi that the Occupiers have put out in the media ever since the Bridge Occupation -- to the effect that the police "lured them off the path" and "into arrest nets" -- is pure baloney.

Of course, we know it's baloney from having followed it and heard from eye witnesses and other less, er engaged media. If you read the Twitter feed of this loon who uses the hipster Twitter handle of @destructuremal, you can see he specializes in rants against the Man, and frequently illustrates he has a father complex by hashtagging "nodads". Sigh. Here's one:

I'M ALL UP IN UR CAPITAL, ACCELERATIN' UR DEMISE

Mkay. Actually, it's the sectarian wack-a-doole Occupy that is in demise, not capital, but...whatever.

If the tweets were public, but just not accessible now because either the guy deleted them after the fact or they can't be pulled up on laggy dysfunctional Twitter, why can't we have them in court as part of the discovery? Truly.

The judge first used a gambit which I think was iffy -- he opined that tweets are not the users' property, but the property of the company Twitter. Well, I'd have to study the TOS again, but I don't think Twitter makes that claim, the way a lot of platforms do. That is, they'd like to have safe harbour status like any of the Internet social media giants facing tons of lawsuits, so they probably had their lawyers all over that. As users, we don't want content owned by the company and this isn't a good gambit to be deploying.

What's much more substantive and operative is the need to challenge the narrative of "we was lured" -- and the need to uncover that. I'm all for that.

And interestingly enough, the "reporter" who actually most contributes to the debunking of that narrative -- inadvertently! -- is none other than Natasha Lennard, the radical Occupy supporter who worked as a freelancer for a time at The New York Times, after stints at Salon and Politico, and then was, er, let go. Whereupon she bitched on Salon, Why I Quit the Mainstream Media. Or was fired?

What's interesting is that I was the first to uncover and publish the fact that Natasha had spoken at the Bluestockings Book Store teach-in on Occupy, covered on video by Jacobin, a radical leftist publication. I put up a blog with a link to the video on October 22, which I uncovered even before I did the blog, and included some notes from this long discussion among old and new lefties on what the politically correct "line" should be on Occupy. (Do the Jacobins favour guillotines?) The discussion made it clear that far from an unbiased journalist, or even a reporter cloaked in the typical "progressive" cocoon of the New York Times journalist milieu, she was very supportive of Occupy and picked and chosed what she covered about it.

I recall even posting a comment among the zillions of comments about Occupy on Breitbart, and interestingly, Lee Stranahan then did a blog the next day (October 23) referencing this very video, which I think was fairly obscure, but not mentioning me. Now, it's quite possible he did find this all on his own, but I do have to wonder. Anyway, I was first! He wrote a letter complaining to the Times about this bias -- actually, I did, too, but just didn't think to save and publish it, although I've referenced the problem in subsequent comments.

The Internet was filled with pointed suggestions that officers from the New York Police Department led protesters onto the road as a trap to perform mass arrests; indeed, some video footage seems to show officers leading protesters onto the “illegal” section of the bridge. From what I saw, however, a couple of dozen marchers made the decision to move off the sidewalk into the road at the bridge’s entrance to chants of “off the sidewalks, into the streets.”

This breakaway group quickly gained support of surrounding marchers, numbers of whom jumped over barricades on the sidewalk’s edge to stream into the road, until hundreds of people eventually covered the passageway usually intended for a steady flow of traffic.

“ ‘Whose bridge? Our bridge!’ the marchers chanted as they walked onto the Brooklyn Bridge. Two vehicle lanes occupied,” I posted on Twitter at the the time. The mood was celebratory and confrontations with the police were not widely expected.

People who are being "lured" into their arrest wouldn't be crying "Whose bridge? Our bridge!" -- that's what occupiers chant as they commit occupation, or civil disobedience.

So despite her very biased approach to all this, Lennard was enough of a reporter to say that she saw marchers making the decision to go off the footpath and lure others -- not police. About police, she said videos only "seem" to indicate this. I hope the judge includes her report in his evaluation of the testimony!

At the time, only James Taranto of The Wall Street Journal would report the truth about this Twitter dude bragging about his exploits and then expecting not to take the rap for them. Everyone else was getting all victimological about it. Of course, there was the obvious socialist tendentiousness around it.

My beef with Occupy all along isn't just the incitement to violence, the extremism, and the outright old-style communist Bolshevism in a lot of what they're doing, even if they also had earnest young people who owed school loans or authentic social movement types among them.

No, what I loathed about them was their unwillingness to concede what civil disobedience is: it means going limp, being arrested, and taking your medicine -- time in jail or a fine.

What these entitlement-happy freaks would do instead would claim their "rights" were violated even as they violated the law; they would fight and even push and hit policemen or knock fences around instead of peacefully demonstrating; and they would act as if they had an inherent right to take over spaces and foment revolution without any consequences.

So I'm all for them facing due and lawful consequences to their civil disobedience, because they did decide to walk off the path and make a deliberate nuisance of themselves -- they were not "lured".

09/14/2012

Clashes between demonstrators in troops outside US Embassy in Cairo back in March 2012. Photo by Gigi Ibrahim.

I wrote of the concept of "incitement of imminent violence" and the UN Resolution 16/18 co-sponsored at the Human Rights Council that explicitly makes the distinction between "incitement of imminent violence" and insulting hate speech, and urges tolerance without accepting the Islamic notion of "defamation of religions", which has formed the basis for a number of resolutions passed at the UN resisted by the West as antithetical to free speech and tantamount to a "global blasphemy law".

Now some of the Arabic states are calling for a return of the concept of "defamation of religions" because of the wave of violence sparked by a crude anti-Muslim film made in the US, which has already been used to justify the assassination of our ambassador and Embassy staff in Libya and now has led to the deaths of four protesters in Yemen.

There's confusion about what "incitement to imminent violence" means, because many hearing this unfamiliar term that actually comes from US Supreme Court decisions think that it means that if you insult somebody in your hate video, they get to beat or kill you - and therefore your incendiary video is the problem if it "incited" that sort of violence

That's not the legal meaning or jurisprudence, however, as it is not "imminent"; "imminent incitement" means that the video producer would have to incite others to hurt or kill the targets of his hate, not that the insulted are inflamed enough to kill people. The anti-Muslim video in fact doesn't call for any harm or murder or even discrimination -- instead, it seeks to discredit the faith by ridiculing the Prophet Mohammed and trying to portray this religious figure and the precepts of the religion as not practicing the pure ideals they claim by implying they are pedophiles and womanizers.

As atrocious as this movie is, it would never qualify in a US court as speech not protected by the First Amendment, and even if lodged as a case with the UN Human Rights Committee, which would look at it in terms of Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, would it be characterized as meeting those existing tests -- unless the case became hopelessly politicized. And indeed, it might. But even in Europe, which has lower standards for free speech and will prosecute hate speech, the film would not likely meet the test. Google, Inc. -- which is our new world court on adjudication of free speech issues, unfortunately, by dint of its sheer power of platform -- has removed the video in Muslim countries such as Egypt and Libya, where there are blasphemy laws, either pre-emptively for fear of association with violence or at the request of governments, but it hasn't removed it here in the US or in Europe, even with angry Muslim populations.

Even so, there is going to be a tidal wave of political correctness around this issue, given the dramatic consequences said to come from this movie. So I think we need to fight back if we care about human rights.

Accordingly, I think the West has to immediately start calling for an "insult violence" resolution at the UN to counter the "defamation of religions" resolution sure to come. The compromise and careful calibrations didn't work -- or at least didn't work fast enough -- from 16/8. The earnest NGO types and State Department liberals who pushed this resolution with Egypt hoped that they could substitute some authoritarian states' yen for legal prosecution with softer educational and political actions that are not operative or binding.

Yet as multicultural as the California school system no doubt is; as oppressive of hate speech as the average college campus is; as coercive as the average work place speech code is in many places in America, this hate film still managed to get started by a Coptic emigre (who, by the way, tried to displace blame for the film on the Jews, accomplishing a double whammy with his hatred.) The hate film occurred in the interstices of all the real-life constraints against hate speech in the home school, campus, and workplace, and thrived in the global commons of Youtube.

And really, leading by example, pious statements by leaders, education, promotion of alternatives, peace-making -- these are all good, but are not really the issue.

The problem is that for a hardcore subset of male Muslims, insult to their revered religious leader and precepts is intimately linked to their concept of not only noble manhood, but aggressive machismo -- it's even worse than insulting the mother of a Latin American or Russian with crude swear words. They allow themselves to be insulted to the maximum -- and are willing to kill for it. That's why I don't think we can let their hurt feelings be our guide -- if their capacity for reaction to insult goes as far as murder. When the US Cairo Embassy invoked "hurt feelings" and the need to accommodate them, without even a "nothing justifies violence" at the time of the statement or later (that had to come from Washington), it opened up the Pandora's box to endless justification of violence.

To be sure, there is another Supreme Court notion, "fighting words," and by some lights, the video might be construed as "fighting words" meant to invoke rage, even if not constituting "incitement to imminent violence." But "fighting words" has a long and complicated history of adjudication, and it's worth thinking about whether insult to religion, which isn't made face to face or in a real life setting, but is only made on social media, really can be acceptable. After all, you don't have to watch the film? And our government and mainstream networks obviously aren't showing it. Although the incitement, hatred and "fighting words" may all be authentic, they are not in a real-life direct social context -- they are mediated on the Internet. Can't we concede that the virtual is less than the real, or at least, reaffirm that virtual insult shouldn't justify real murder?

We should focus rather on disassociation from hate speech, condemnation of it as intolerant as a moral rather than legal matter, and emphasize that freedom of speech and freedom of religion are the two pillars of a civil society that will ensure that intolerance doesn't reach the level of discrimination, harm or even murder.

But we're going to have to go further if we're going to take an erosion of the past consensus now and a return to "defamation of religions" or a global blasphemy regime maintained even by Google. The reality is 16/18 will never work, and the exchange between Obama and the Egyptian president lets us know it. Fearful of US withdrawal of aid, the Egyptian leadership improved their posture 180 degrees after the murder of our diplomats and began to make more pronounced statements of condemnation of violence. But their hearts aren't in it, as we can see by their call for legal means to stop the hate video.

That's why we need a resolution that very squarely calls for condemnation of "insult violence" -- just exactly as we have had attempts at resolutions, and at least language of questioning during treaty body examinations about "honour killings" and crimes of bias -- racist and homophobic violence. Some years ago, the Netherlands and other Western countries attempted a resolution to condemn "honour killings," the murder of women believed to have become impure from adultery, or even simply going about with bare heads or without proper male escorts. This resolution was a tough sell, especially with the OIC but given how widespread this practice is in South Asia, i.e. with the bride burnings in India, but it had some support. International human rights groups and women's rights groups adopted this cause heartily, no religious belief about women's purity could trump the precept against injury and murder that are in the commandments of all religions.

Recently, the US has made gay rights a center of US international human rights policy and promoted it at the UN, particularly in light of crimes of violence against LGBTIQ people.

In the same way, we have to apply the same human rights logic to the problem of "insult violence" and not shirk our duty to universality by fears of political correctness due to the nature of the insulting media content.

Nothing justifies violence. Nothing! And it needs a resolution to spell it out: even very great sentiments of insult, caused by hate media, cannot justify it.

We need to call the bluff of these easily-insulted male extremists. Their aggravated and often artificially contrived rage reactions cannot drive foreign policy or international human rights definitions.

We already sense that there is something contrived about this, when we see the attacks on the Libyan US Embassy seem coordinated and organized, not spontaneous from an irate mob. How is it that countries without a lot of Internet penetration, with a fair amount of Internet control, can suddenly invoke viral videos as a reason for killing people? The calls of imams at Friday prayers were the kind of "incitement of imminent violence" that in fact should be prosecuted and recognized as just that sort of incitement intended by Resolution 16/18 -- they incited believers directly to go attack foreign properties and foreigners themselves over this indignity against their religion. So if we see a submission of the American hate video to the UN Human Rights Committee for a determination, then a counter-case against the imams who sicced mosque-goers on the American Embassy has to go in the next day. Let's all be lawyers.

The resolution on "insult violence" has to begin by acknowledging the goals of 16/18, acknowledge that *if* there is "incitement to imminent violence" then authorities have a duty to act, i.e. by removing a video from Youtube. But in cases where the offensive media does not meet that test in a democratic state under the rule of law, then extrajudicial means -- murder and mayhem -- CANNOT be sanctioned.

Any effort to keep meeting the injured but not innocent half way with any kind of speech curbs MUST be seen in exactly this light: sanctioning extrajudicial means of abuse and killing to address sentiments roused by hate.

And that can't be in an international human rights regimen. That cannot be. Human rights advocates need to keep their heads on straight about this.

The "insult violence" resolution has to lay out very clearly that injury and killing as a response to feelings of insult is not acceptable and is sanctioned under the same principles that underpin all human rights treaties. The state has a positive obligation to ensure that non-state actors do not subject others to extrajudicial harm and killing over insult. The state itself cannot aid and abet in the injury or killing of people over the issue of insult as a "negative right".

I'm well aware that the Obama Administration will be likely to take up a resolution on "insult violence". The political correctness and allergy to hardcore human rights advocacy there runs too deep. It might take the Romney Administration coming in to get such a defensive and pre-emptive operation going to foil the "defamation of religions" revival surely coming. But other countries like Canada or Australia might pick this notion up, or even the states where this violence is occuring like Bangladesh.

Shy of a resolution, there are other things states can do -- they can ask the Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial killings or the Special Rapporteur on racism or the Special Rapporteur on freedom of expression -- or all three, jointly -- to report on "insult violence" around the world and see if they can justifiably tie it to actual products of freedom of expression, and see if other existing remedies like removal of content or opportunities for alternative content or statements by political leaders might not be deployed shy of angry, murderous mobs.

The social base for this "insult violence" resolution is actually larger than some might think.

The reality is, most Muslims don't riot and scale Embassy walls and burn buildings and kill people. In Libya, people stood with signs saying they were sorry about the attack on the US Embassy. No, there is only a tiny minority of extremists who don't represent their religion or people, by and large. They have help getting insulted and riled up, and are usually involved in other terror activities and aren't just indignant townspeople.

After all, last week, before 9/11 and this evidently planned attack in Libya and the other spontaneous mob outburts that had a lot of help, anyone could have said 16/18 was working. A disabled young Christian girl in Pakistan who had inadvertently insulted the Koran -- or been set up by a corrupt cleric to seem to be insulting the Koran, it's not clear -- was first jailed and mistreated, but then released as judges, lawyers, human rights groups, ordinary people began to object. There are a lot of "blasphemy" cases in Pakistan, and this case, which was such an abuse of the concept even in its own terms, was getting people to question the notion, which is often used merely to settle scores. Everybody was making progress on rolling back some of the awful prosecutorial zeal around blasphemy in Pakistan -- and now this.

But we can keep fighting back and keep pointing out that when extremists and opportunists riot, often demonstrators themselves are the victims, as they have been in Afghanistan where they have been beaten or shot dead by police when rioting against the burning of the Koran.

"Insult Violence" has to stop. It has led to the harm of children such as this disabled Christian girl; it has led to the killing of our ambassador and staff in Libya; it has led to the killing of frou demonstrators in Yemen -- and many, many more, notably in Afghanistan. States much get together and sanction it, and work toward stopping it, just as they work toward stopping honour killings, hate crimes against gays, or extrajudicial killings by any persons.

09/13/2012

I have felt so devastated all day at the thought of our ambassador in Libya and his staff killed by an angry mob, supposedly because of a hate video. It has the feel of the Carter administration and the hostages in Iran to me, and I pray it doesn't escalate. Liberating countries is a bad business. It seldom works out right. The former international consensus on action on Libya was already in tatters making cooperation on Syria impossible - now we'll be hearing an "I told you so" from the Russians till the cows come home -- which of course distracts from their own evil role in Syria and Iran.

The story that everybody is Facebooking and even discussing out on the street now is taking a shape like this: an American of either Jewish or Coptic background with Jewish donors and fundamentalist Christian consultants made a crude anti-Muslim video which got Muslims in Libya and Egypt so mad that they rioted, and in the mob rage, our ambassador to Libya, Amb. Chris Stevens, and four State Department officials who worked in the Embassy, have been killled. So this hateful movie incited hatred and ended in violence, so we should remove it from Youtube, and mind our tongues. Romney was shameful to bash Obama over this for failed policy, when it wasn't his fault and wasn't respectful of either our people killed or those Muslims insulted. So goes one version.

Or, conversely, we shouldn't give an inch or we will lose our own values for free speech, Romney spoke the truth, Obama's failure to manage the response to the Arab Spring and his apologies to Middle Eastern leaders has caused extremists to take advantage of our weakness.

"The Obama administration's first response was not to condemn attacks on our diplomatic missions, but to sympathize with those who waged the attacks."

The reason he could sense this incident as a "sympathizing" with those who scale Embassy walls to maim and kill people was because of this statement from the US Embassy in Cairo, which still remains on the Embassy website, despite the tweets about it being removed:

The Embassy of the United States in Cairo condemns the continuing efforts by misguided individuals to hurt the religious feelings of Muslims - as we condemn efforts to offend believers of all religions. Today, the 11th anniversary of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States, Americans are honoring our patriots and those who serve our nation as the fitting response to the enemies of democracy. Respect for religious beliefs is a cornerstone of American democracy. We firmly reject the actions by those who abuse the universal right of free speech to hurt the religious beliefs of others.

There are a number of appalling things about this statement, and indeed it is an apology despite all the hortatory gyrations of the fact-checkers declaring it as "pants on fire" lie at Politfakt, because it wrongly starts from a premise that *concedes the perspective of the purportedly insulted Muslim as paramount* and worse, it invokes a notion completely antithetical both to US civil rights law as defined by US Supreme Court decisions and to international human rights law by implying that *because of that sense of injury* there must be some mandatory "respect for religious belief" akin to a blasphemy law, i.e. criminalizing or penalizing the insult of God or religious figures.

In a final awful turn of phrase, this statement implies there is some notion that free speech can be "abused" and others' religious beliefs "hurt". These are overbroad to say the least -- in fact, in over-sharing the perspective of the insulted Mulsim, which can be very capacious indeed, this statement has completely turned American values on their ear.

To be literalist, Fisking about whether or not the search word "apology" appears in this string of text is to completely miss the disturbing capitulation that took place: Larry Schwartz, the information officer who wrote this statement is overturning decades of work at the UN by his very colleagues in the State Department and other like-minded diplomats to make the all-important distinction between incitement to imminent violence and insult, between mere "hurt feelings" and real harm.

WHAT IS INSULT?

Why can't you concede the perspective of an insulted Muslim? Wasn't the movie insulting? That's an easy question to answer once you clear away your haze of fearful political correctness: because the notion of hurt feelings is endless and capacious and can't be defined adequately so as not to injure legitimate criticism of Islam -- free speech. You can condemn hateful language because it is hateful! You don't have to go further and invent capacious injuries of insult where they may not even exist or shouldn't exist to the point of violence -- much less tip-toe around these sentiments.

Finding this hard to parse, people? Well, take out those magnifying glasses and compasses and rulers you use to make those very, very fine distinctions between antisemitism and legitimate criticism of Israel and Zionism! Think of it as something like that!

Interestingly, while there are still some busy thumping their "progressive" chests and defending this Cairo Embassy message, it turns out that this statement wasn't cleared -- not surprisingly as anybody who has followed this sort of issue inside the State Department -- and that Schwartz went with it anyway in the belief it would pre-empt violence. It didn't. It merely illustrated how pandering to notions of insult and blasphemy get you nowhere. It's indicative of a school of foreign service and Beltway thinking that strives to address what they see as a misguided war on terror and provide the "anti-Islamophobia" work they feel needs doing to offset others somewhere else in the government who see see Muslim terrorists under every bush.

The Cairo Embassy statement was issued before the assassination of the ambassador and staff -- which we now know was a planned action by a branch of Al Qaeda, with possibly the mob reaction to the video as a cover. I'm continuing to ask if the entire video was a hoax, with some of the fundamentalist Christians and Coptics in the mix some unwitting agents of influence.

JOINT US AND EGYPTIAN UN RESOLUTION

In any event, I think few people thinking about this realize that the US and Egypt, whatever their differences (and they were always significant and remain so) collaborated on a joint resolution (no. 16/18) last year passed a resolution at the often-controversial UN Human Rights Council with the lofty title of:

Combating intolerance, negative stereotyping and stigmatization of, and discrimination, incitement to violence, and violence against persons based on religion or belief.

This resolution had a tortured history, beginning with a series of resolutions that the Organization of Islamic Community got passed in various bodies over the years condemning "defamation of religions". This was essentially a bid to prevent criticism of theocratic states, and also to prevent the ridicule of Mohammed and Muslims, as occurred with the Danish Cartoons. The Western democracies fought this, because it would be antithetical to free speech. They lost, because the "non-alligned movement" (which we just saw show up in Iran) tends to back the OIC in their anti-Western agitation.

Nevertheless, various human rights groups, notably Human Rights First, which was formerly headed by Michael Posner, who is now the Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor in the Obama Administration, worked for a better resolution to be passed that would promise action to be taken against intolerance and hatred, but would not involve "defamation" or blasphemy.

When the US came back on the UN Human Rights Council, with the expert work of Suzanne Nossel and other officials in the International Organizations section of the State Department, this resolution 16/18 was finally passed. It had a crucial concept taken straight out of US Supreme Court jurisprudence: only "incitement of imminent violence" can be criminalized (Brandenberg v. Ohio). That's the Supreme Court test, which is explained like this: while you can call in a general sort of way for Jews or blacks to be killed, and not be prosecuted in the US, if you stand on the street corner and call for Jews or blacks to be killed *right now* this instant when there's a mob with clubs nearby, you can be prosecuted. It is seldom if ever used in fact to prosecute anybody, as usually hate crimes involving violence have criminal offenses to be invoked, and the bias aspect of the crime, rather than having to parse speech.

This wording in the UN resolution, while it may seem inadequate or even problematic, was hard-won, it took many hours of negotiation, but in the end, Egypt and the other OIC countries accepted it because it also came with a lot of promises for actions -- training of officials, improvement in tolerance education and so on.

The US called this a "consensus" resolution meaning that it represented a negotiated outcome that was as good as it could get, but was pleased with the outcome. US officials feel as if this is one of their great achievements on the Council and in foreign policy in general, and they are very prickly about any attempts to criticize it as perhaps insufficient or easily manipulated. Most of the criticism has come from a few right-wingers, for whom it seemed to contain too much capitulation; lefty human rights groups concerned about threats to free speech passed on it. Interestingly, Abigail Esman at Forbes, not part of the international justice jet-set privy to the negotiations of human rights documents (and the special meaning we all hope some of the hard-won wording will retain), was publicly skeptical, and seemed unaware at first of the Supreme Court background to the phrase "incitement to imminent violence." She reasoned that "defamation" and "incitement" were likely easily interchangeable for Islamic states -- and she's right.

The various incidents that have occurred since this resolution, whether the pastor who wanted to burn the Koran in the US, or the US troops accidentally burning the Koran, or now this hate video on Youtube -- as bad as they are and worthy of our condemnation -- do not meet the US test of incitement of imminent violence. They don't call for the harming or killing of people or even the destruction of property as such; they merely disrespect a holy book and holy figures.

Nevertheless, it's precisely these types of incidents that the OIC wants to stop by force of international law and with prosecution -- and some of their people are willing to back up their desire with violent retaliation.

There can be confusion about what "incitement to imminent violence" means when the reaction to these hate videos is to retaliate and kill Americans. But that's not the context of the jurisprudence, which refers not to those who feel they are injured and insulted, but refers to those who are doing the inciting of others to do injury. There is jurisprudence around this in Article 19 and Article 20 in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights at the separate UN Human Rights Committee as well. States can suppress speech for "reasons of public order or national security in a democratic state" -- more hard-won negotiated language! -- but there might be good arguments made that none of these incidents fit those tests, either.

WHAT WENT WRONG WITH THE CAIRO STATEMENT?

Larry Schwartz and his colleagues seemed completely oblivious of all these existing ways of treating this problem of insult and incitement, and maybe never got the memo on 16/18 -- although that is very hard to believe as it was a press release on the US Embassy in Geneva and disseminated throughout the Foreign Service community. Had someone alive and atuned to the nuances of these hard-won consensus documents *with Egypt* taken a hand to this "preventive" statement, they could have used language right out of the resolution, and said the US:

"Condemns any advocacy of religious hatred that constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence, whether it involves the use of print, audio-visual or electronic media or any other means"

They would not even have to go into more hazardous territory and speak about the need to determine whether incitement be to imminent violence; they could just leave the more defined statement out there so that the discussion can be had in the press and in the home.

That way they could leave intact the rightful American values of not restricting speech, especially critical of government or religious public figures, but not appear to be endorsing hatred. Let the courts decide -- although let's not have pretentions that courts in Egypt would decide this justly.

But then in the next sentence, they could say something like this:

"The US affirms the universal values of freedom of speech and freedom of religion" -- full stop, without having to invent trouble by talking about "abuses" of rights which isn't a legal concept in this context. Then they could add what amounts to a moral, not a legal position: "We deplore displays of intolerance and hatred to the Muslim religion and we call for tolerance and respect." That doesn't *mandate* respect but just urges it as a moral act. The phrase "Nothing justifies violence" then would have to finish out this brief statement-that-could-have-been -- and actually, should be drafted immediately for use in the inevitable next round of insulted Muslims using violence to stop speech they don't like.

Now, because it can be hard to explain one's thinking in the compression of Twitter, I'll respond to an interesting blog by Shai Franklin, a long time champion for human rights and Jewish community leader.

He find Romney's denunciation of Obama terrible and even reckless -- they appear to indict all of Obama's policy in the Middle East -- and he feels that all of this is feeding into the right-wing pro-Israel Jewish forces that he, as a liberal who also loves Israel, evidently wants to disassociate himself from. Understood.

That's a family fight that I'm not part of, and therefore don't feel as constrained by. People are constantly calling me a neocon, a CIA agent, a Zionist, etc. even though I am a non-governmental activist who is Catholic by faith and who has always voted for the Democratic candidate in elections. That is, I can sympathize with the revulsion of "settler terrorism" that J-Street and the Council on Foreign Relations and Peter Beinhart and many other liberals feel, in defiance of what they see as AIPAC driven politics, but I take it more simply: why do Obama and Ban Ki Moon put pressure on the issue of the settlements so publicly, but never put pressure on Palestinians to renounce terror and violent attacks on Israel? Can't we have both? And so on.

I also don't see a problem with calling into question all of Obama's Middle East policy, given the results we see. They are problems he inherited, but problems he didn't fix because of his realpolitik with states and "quiet diplomacy". What's all this taking Jerusalem out, then putting it back in to the DNC platform? What's all this about scolding Netanyahu? Doesn't this display weakness and disarray that any fanatical extremism can see as an entree to move in and help weaken the camp further?

OBAMA'S RUINOUS FOREIGN POLICY

This incident for me -- where Obama had to be shaken into reactively saying "nothing justifies violence" instead of leading with it instinctively -- is part and parcel of bad Obama foreign policy on human rights, which I view rooted in the worldview of the Democratic Socialists of America and others that influenced the young Barack in the community organizing movement. And that is that peace and politics come before human rights advocacy or demands, and they get thrown under the bus -- especially with Russia, Africa, China.

If you don't want to hear neocons ranting about Obama's apologetic stance -- and that's exactly what it is! -- then read George Packer in 2010, an impeccable New Yorker liberal, who essentially says the same thing -- he calls out the president for not making human rights central to foreign policy, for calibrating it according to perceived American interests country by country, for addressing Middle Eastern aspirations for freedom with programs for business or children, and not women and human rights.

Obama ruined 35 years of work around the Helsinki Accords when he went to Russia the first time and told the Russians, even in doing the good deed of raising Mikhail Khodorkovsky's case, that he was "not going to interfere in their internal affairs". This was absorption of too much Soviet propaganda via the peace movements of the 1980s he was in and around. It's not an internal affair to raise universal principles on a case where universal human rights are violated. The problem continued to this day, as Obama rejects the Magnitsky Act in favour of a realpolitik approach to Russia that doesn't work. He added insult to injury when he invoked a staple of Soviet propaganda circa 1982 -- "no first use of nuclear weapons" -- which the Soviets could smugly demand as they had tank superiority in Eastern Europe.

Or take his actions around Iran -- pulling punches, talking about deals with no conditions. Or China -- where fortunately, the story of the dissident in the Embassy ended well, but which involved too protracted a time when it didn't, with the diplomats even letting him leave, and losing touch with him when he was hospitalized.

Then -- during his DNC acceptance speech, Obama sets back 30 years of work by US diplomats at the UN again, urging that there be "responsibilities" as well as "rights" -- as if we all, NGOs and officials alike, didn't beat back this bad-faithed notion from states like Russia, China, Sudan, and Pakistan eager to distract from their own massive human rights crimes and put the burden on citizens to be "more responsible" to the state.

There has been so much more like that -- and now this. There continues to be a huge fuss on the left -- opportunistically so, of course, given the approaching elections -- that Romney has ruined his chances for election. No, he has not. People need to think more clearly about this in the coming days. Again, why did it take Romney's stark condemnation to finally shake out of Obama this "clarification": ""While the United States rejects efforts to denigrate the religious
beliefs of others, we must all unequivocally oppose the kind of
senseless violence that took the lives of these public servants." Romney sounds so blunt and "awkward" to some because they've been in a soothing cocoon for four years trying to reassure themselves that Obama is really for human rights. He's not. Let's move on. Let the Democrats come up with someone who is in four years.

Neither statement "sympathized" with the attackers, as Mr. Romney
claimed. Nor did they amount to what Mr. Romney claims to be a pattern
of Mr. Obama apologizing to the world. And it was in poor taste for Mr.
Romney to open a line of political attack even as news broke about the
deaths in Libya — on the anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks to boot.

In fact, the statement did kowtow to the mob climbing the fence precisely because it comes from a profound place of sympathy with the insulted -- and that is the problem. And indeed it is part of a concerted policy, begun with the very Cairo speech, to bow and duck and retreat and apologize for our perceived pass aggressive promotion of democracy, our "lecturing" on human rights. There's no sense of "hey, guys, it's just a video made by these wackos who don't mean anything, let's not go crazy, eh?"

Why don't all those Hollywood stars who love to stump for Obama now come out with a statement repudiating this crude hate film, but affirming freedom of expression vital to their industry and condemning violence in response to film?

BTW, the Baltimore Sun could easily find out that Romney made the statement before the news of the deaths broke, but it doesn't matter. It's not like politics is off limit on the anniversary of a terrorist attack or before elections -- that's when we need political debates and it's so typical of the Obama Administration and the liberals that hold it so close to try to put a chill on speech and debate by invoking church-lady notions of proprietary.

09/12/2012

Joshua Keating is now finding fault with Julian Assange -- of course, too, little, too late. Still, it's all to the good, as he even awards WikiLeaks the prize for worst analysis of the tragedy in Libya, by claiming that the US "set up" this situation of mobs and militants attacking our embassies abroad by supposedly backing the UK stance on Assange in the Embassy of Ecuador in London. But Assange doesn't face a well-founded fear of persecution," to put it in US legal terms, because he faces proper and legitimate action by the Swedish justice system. The US Department of Justice has not issued any warrant or request for extradition or even any statement about Assange, and it's just pure victimology to claim that Assange shouldn't face the music in Sweden due to ostensible fears of extradition to the US.

Micah Sifry also had an excellent piece critiquing Assange that really is quite admirable and very nearly restored my faith in the left in America as an honourable enterprise.

Micah's mad that the cause for radical transparency is lost with this goofus as its mascot, and he's right -- except I'm not sure the cause of radical transparency was ever just in the first place, especially when it is so unevenly applied only to America.

But Micah's right that in movement terms, Assange is a "single point of failure" by drawing all the blanket on himself and trying to make it seem as if he were indispensable. But I don't know why Sifry thinks that "leaderless" distributed movements of the sort that Alec Ross salivates over are in fact building institution when in fact they are only about marches through them to turn them, or more often destruction of them.

Sifry talks about the disenchantment in Assange from his former colleagues, and quotes Birgitta Jonsdottir -- no angel, she. But that means he's willing to accept the moral component of the WikiLeaks problem. It's not just that Assage let down the comrades with selfishness and hogging the lime-light -- his own bad character and bad behaviour damaged its reputation. Sifry seems to take the Swedish women's complaints at face value -- which is admirable, especially for a man of the left, when so many "progressive" men online have been smearing these women as sluts or worse, US agents.

I remember the evening organized by Sifry at NYU in which Rosen's idea, which Clay Shirky was enthusiastically touting, seemed the wave of the future, and was capturing the imagination of the left (Sifry hurried to put out a book about it):

The idea of a transnational, or "stateless"
as Jay Rosen put it, news organization that anyone could safely and
anonymously leak to, in order to blow the whistle on all kinds of
official misbehavior, and that no single government could intimidate,
seemed unstoppable.

Except, there's nothing *good* about transnational stateless beings who have no governance or higher power that governs *them*. Sovereignty isn't a bad thing, and provides a framework for a national justice system *and* a corrective on the venality of the international systems as well. Er, why did we need stateless entities to blow whistles on states? You can criticize states without having to pretend that you are purer than Ceaser's wife yourself. Most of what we've seen from these lovely transnational stateless movements like WikiLeaks, Occupy, and Anonymous has been *awful* -- thuggish, violent, stupid, failed.

Micah reminds us of the secretive figure named "the architect" who was originally involved in WikiLeaks, and writes:

Not only did Domscheit-Berg and Jonsdottir stop working with Wikileaks,
so did the "architect," who took the software that had enabled the site
to safely receive anonymous leaks.

Say, was the "architect" Jacob Appelbaum, do you think? Likely not, given that he stood by Assange at that infamous hacker's meeting after which he began to be tracked by the FBI, and I haven't seen him be critical of the albino goon ever, on Twitter, the way Jonsdottir is.

When hordes of Anony-mice on Twitter are justifying every bad thing that Assange and WikiLeaks does, Sifty, under his own real name, is saying that WikiLeaks harmed people by exposing the sources mentioned in the cables. Most of the time, the snotty kids defending the hackers make it seem like there is no harm at all, or that it is exaggerated, or even, appalling, as Jonsdottir did with me when I confronted her in Dublin, claiming that the harm of some of the sources was worth it because of the ostensibly greater harm of the US troops which was now exposed. Huh? No wonder these people always remind me of Bolsheviks. They never proved their case with "Collateral Murder" -- regrettably, Sifry doesn't extend his admirable decency here in this piece to concede that Big Lie.

Sifry also braves Glenn Greenwald, who implies that invoking Ecuador's press freedom problems is a distraction, and does invoke it. Good! It must be invoked, and he even does it altruistically, saying WikiLeaks itself could face problems in that repressive environment.

After this generally excellent performance, Sifry then fails on the honesty quotient by implying that Assange couldn't get a fair trial in the US. Are you kidding?! Every lefty lawyer and prog human rights outfit would be all over this like white on rice. He would have an ultra-hyper-extraordinary fair trial with every white hair on his head covered by the prog press. But...there isn't a case. Nobody issued an indictment. Come on people, it's been nearly two years now since Cablegate. It's not likely coming. Let's stop scaring ourselves with our own shadows, eh?

In conclusion, Sifry says:

The cause of transparency is far, far bigger than the legal troubles of
one brilliant, courageous but ultimately flawed individual. Britain
ought to let Assange flee to Ecuador, because there's little chance he
can get a fair trial in either Sweden or the United States. But then
let's be done with him. Those of us who want freedom of information to
thrive should learn a key lesson from Assange's case. For information to
flow freely, there can't be any single point of control.

I think it's a utopian fantasy to imagine there can be stateless leaderless transparently flowing platforms that function as Sifry implies. How about starting with some transparency on who "architect" is? Why can't these people stand up and name their names if they are so sure they are just?

A welcome admission, but too little, too late. See that other latecomer, Micah Sifry as well, at TechPresident.

While you touch upon superficial issues and cultural issues that rub you the wrong way, neither of you seem to concede the real way that WikiLeaks harmed the cause of transparency -- which of course, was never really its cause (in fact, destruction of the liberal government of America is):

o making common cause with the hacker vigilantes Anonymous, and allowing them to crash servers and steal data for the sake of their cause -- Assange even sicced LulzSec after an enemy in Iceland.

o presenting tendentious, misleading, and mendacious material in "Collateral Murder". Jacob Appelbaum continued to lie outright that US soldiers had deliberately injured children, which was false. This film didn't proof US complicity in any war crime, but only exposed just how manipulative and false WikiLeaks is.

o there's no "to be fair" here -- the overwhelming majority of materials stem from their anti-American bias, and they never followed up on any other areas of the world with any sincerity

o Israel Shamir, the East European representative, conspired with the Belarusian dictator Lukashenka and may have leaked cables to him to harm the democratic Belarusian opposition

o there are plenty of people harmed by WikiLeaks -- but they don't wish to further paint a target on their backs and prove that to jaded journalists. I know some personally and it's appalling. I've confronted WikiLeaks leaders and prominent supporters personally on their culpability, and like Bolsheviks, they think the ends justifies the means, and some sources *have* to be harmed (not just get accidentally harmed!) to offset what they see as harm caused by US troops in wars

o making common cause with the Kremlin is despicable

o And I'm glad you're reinforcing the existing information that points to Assange's collusion with Manning, although he lies about this and says he was never in contact with him.

All in all, in the larger scheme of things, it's good that these two sturdy "progressives" help give their dubious cause a better name by criticizing the obviously awful. That isolates and discredits a little more the WikiLeaks freaks on Twitter who keep propagandizing and bullying and distracting on behalf of their failed hero.

09/07/2012

I've been traveling and busy and haven't been able to catch up on my blogging to-do list -- but catching sight of a tweet from Alec Ross, the State Department's Innovation Director just now, I just remembered that I have to set the record straight on a blog of some months ago about him.

I had gone to hear him speak on a panel at Carnegie about "21st Century Diplomacy" in Washington, and he had talked about the post-Westphalian world and such. I remarked that he had basically manipulated social media to artificially boost the issue of SOPA/PIPA by taking it up at a very high level in a town hall, responding to a question of a "concerned citizen" (actually a seasoned copyleftist cadre) on Google Hangout -- and it never came to a vote, and it was a circumvention of Congress -- as an activist himself gloated about.

But it turns out that was wrong. Alec was never on Google Hangout. Here's the story.

As I blogged in June, I went to the Dublin conference on Internet Freedom organized by the Irish chair-in-office as a kind of "unconference" (it didn't get official OSCE status because Russia didn't clear on the agenda -- and it's just as well). And there, Google held an evening -- a kind of giant side event under a big tent (!) that was devoted to freedom of expression on the Internet. I was worried about this precedent of having corporations do side events at OSCE human rights meetings (what's next, the Chevron environmental hour at HDIM?), but it was the chair-in-office's prerogative to do whatever the hell they wanted. Google throws Ireland boatloads of business-- Google pipes its revenue through Ireland, that has less taxes, instead of paying them in our country.

(Although you would never know it, given how absolutely awful the public Internet service was in Dublin -- I've never seen anything as bad in my life in any country--you have to literally keep dropping coins into Internet terminals like a parking meter, or wrestle the really counterintutive goofy interface to put in a charge card, and it knocks you offline anyway every 15 or 30 minutes, whereupon you have to start up the whole ridiculous process again -- and is slow as molasses in January).

ANYWAY, this Google evening was weird, but mercifully, not as bad as I thought, as they opted to go high culture rather than have a debate about pornography and piracy as they did at past big-tents. They had a British writer of Irish descent read a charming tale (I did wonder why they didn't have an Irish Irish writer, but that's just me) and they had various important officials talk earnestly about Internet freedom -- including one of my favourite people, the president of Estonia, famous for putting Paul Krugman in his place.

And Alec Ross was one of the speakers, and Alec said something that I thought was very wrong and very misleading (and so would anyone else following Second Life and the wider online intellectual property issues). He said that technologists had told him that copyright protection could be engineered, and would be engineered, and it was just a matter of time, and that therefore there should be no law.

This is so barkingly bad on a number of levels that I had to go up to him and object in person. I went up and re-introduced myself as one of his critics. It's hard to do this, but he's a public figure and I feel it is my civic duty. He was friendly and apologetic when I confronted him at the Washington, lecture; now, after reading my blog he was unfriendly.

He kept loudly repeatedly, "We're not going to agree on this, we're not going to agree on this" -- as if I was going to have the classic "you can't prevent things from being copied on the Internet" argument. But I was going to put out to him what a crock this "engineering" idea was -- any number of engineers will tell you that it is NOT possible -- and bend your ear for hours on end about it. If you can see it, you can copy it -- the analog hole. Anything can be spoofed. Obfuscation is always beaten. Encryption is always beaten. DRM doesn't work, etc. etc. You have to be "innovative" -- blah blah. Haven't we heard this a million times?!

So at first when Alec Ross dismissed me by merely repeating a kind of Washington pol mantra, I withdrew. But then I thought, dammit, he really is wrong and this really has to get across to him -- and he can't be allowed to get away with this WHOPPER. And he was annoyed at me, too, so we had another dust-up as I saw him a little later in the hall.

"I was never on Google Hangout!" he said to me, sternly, before I could even say anything about copying. I was truly puzzled. Huh? Wasn't he? What could he possibly mean?

"But I remember you went on Facebook and other social media as part of the 21st Century Statecraft month, and you were asked a question about SOPA and said you'd get back on it, and then later you did and announced the president's veto," I countered.

"I was never on Google Hangout," he repeated stubbornly.

"But you were on Facebook."

"But I wasn't on Google Hangout," he reiterated firmly.

I tried to think what this meant because I distinctly recalled this issue being discussed as a town hall on Google Hangout with commentary on Google+.

"So perhaps this was accessed on Google Hangout?" I said, hazarding a hypothesis of how it could have worked, and why I retained an association with Google Hangout -- he was on Facebook or Twitter, but then people discussed him on GHO.

Ross gave me a look of pure hatred, narrowing his eyes. It was as if he thought he was catching me out "lying" and was going to "own" me. But far from somehow "making something up" as he was projecting, I was trying to reason through why I thought he was on Google Hangout -- why that association persisted.

I dug in my heels. "There was a Google Hangout," I persisted.

"I wasn't on Google Hangout," he persisted. So it was a stalemate. He didn't say anything further on it.

"I wasn't born in a cornfield," he began then angrily, talking about the tech aspects of copyright.

"I realize that," I said patiently. "I realize you have all kinds of conversations with Silicon Valley technologists. But so do I," I said, just as stubbornly. "And they are misleading you if they are telling you that they can secure copyright mechanically."

He began talking about how they had implied that if there were sufficient investments this could be done, or in time this could be done, or with new technology this could be done. Huh? Investment? You have got to be kidding. The investments are in how to erode copyright (Pinterest), not keep it; the innovations are workarounds like Facebook blocking Pinterest click-throughs -- but that's something anyone can easily dodge just using Print Screen and Paint. The analog hole, you know...

He walked away mad at me -- seemingly trying to prove I was a shoddy blogger who published lies -- and I was just...stunned.

Memeburn reported on a virtual town hall by the U.S. State Department, during which Alec Ross, Hillary Clinton’s Senior Advisor for Innovation, responded to numerous questions about how social media and the web have influenced U.S. foreign policy. As part of a "social media month," State is also taking questions on Twitter as part of its Friday press briefings — including, last week, on the controversial issue of continued unrest in Sudan.

Overall, I can honestly say that we saw something new in the intersection of government, technology and society. From where I sat, plugged in within the +Sunlight Foundation , it felt like a good thing, not just for the White House or the president's campaign or Google (although all certainly benefited) but for the promise of the Internet to more directly connect public officials to those that they serve, with all of their real problems, concerns, doubts and fears.

That was exactly what I remembered. There was a White House Google Hangout. So what was up?!

Anthony De Rosa of Reuters, that "progressive" who is always reporting his own very lefty views and not the news and "community-organizing" under that tent, reported on this, too.

I was getting more and more puzzled. I checked, and indeed there was a "21st Century Statescraft Month". I looked at De Rosa's headline again: "President Hangs out on Google".

Finally I figured out the issue. The president of the United States -- Barack Obama -- was on a Google Hangout, not Alec Ross.

Oh!

Maybe they didn't take up one of those scarce Hollywood Squares on GHO to put in Ross, but it was the PRESIDENT who was on Google Hangout, NOT HIM.

I was just...stunned. Why didn't he say so?! Instead of stubbornly repeating this "fact-check" "liar-liar-pants-on-fire" claim to me implying shoddy blogging, he could have said:

"Oh, you said I was on Google Hangout. Actually, I was on Facebook and Twitter in townhalls, that must be what you remember, and it was OBAMA who was on Google Hangout." When the POTUS is on a social media happening thing like that, would Ross be literally at his elbow advising him?! And even if he wasn't, couldn't he have said "That was Obama, not me."

He seemed defensive about this because in my past blog, he may have picked up the fact that I don't think much of anything called "town hall" or "civil society" related when it has space for only 16 people on it. That's an elite meeting of insiders, not "the public" and let's not pretend otherwise.

I thought about this intense, devious, self-righteous sophistry, and that flash of a look of pure hatred at me in the belief that *I was doing the same thing*. That's what continues to astound me.

Internet-enabled movements tend to lack the traditional single charismatic leader, inspiring and organizing the masses from on high. Rather, movements that rely heavily on the internet tend to have leadership structures that look like the internet itself -- a distributed web of nodes and connections, rather than a pyramidal, top-down structure. This enables a decentralized form of organization bringing together unlikely combinations of people into rapidly formed movements. While this has the virtue of making movements more citizen-centered and less bound to the cults of personality one often finds in and around protest movements, it also makes these movements more ephemeral and less sustainable. A lack of real structure and widely-accepted leaders has limited the sustainability of many movements, both political and issue-oriented.

But this is total poppycock. Twitter is a good example of how influence is in fact garnered by those with lots of followers -- like Alec Ross. And it's a vicious circle -- unless you are famous enough to get a lot of followers, you will never crack the 2,000 ceiling put on ordinary mortals, as you will crawl very, very slowly up the ladder trying to add followers one at a time and hope others follow you -- enabling you to follow yet another every few days. This system to discourage spam in fact only encourages it, by forcing people to accept the follows of SEO gurus, spammers, prostitutes, etc. so that they can then break the ceiling. I don't accept them and block them routinely, and slowly creep to 1500 or whatever.

The reality is that the leaders are in a highly pyramidal structure. They command mindshare, and everybody else just retweets them. There isn't much dialogue or debate -- those who challenge these "thought leaders" often find they are unfollowed or worse, blocked. It's a terrible system that isn't anything like liberal democracy with institutions like the letter to the editor that in fact has more accessibility.

The protest movements with their cults of personality are in fact only amplified by social media. Many have heard of Wael Ghonim, the Google engineer involved in the Egyptian protests. Can they name anybody else? People become faddish stars and get zillions of followers, and then fall into obscurity again (can you name anybody tweeting about Iran as you could in 2009?)

While in theory there might be nonce groups of people brought together, in fact, with the rigid discipline of muting and blocking, bolstered by heckling and harassing, there isn't much space for collaboration and protection of minority opinion in groups formed. They are all about horrid conformity -- tribes gaining followers for leaders, not collaboration of equals.

Ross doesn't diagnose this problem of social media "thought leaders" correctly, so he then concludes the social media movements lack leaders and are ephemeral. In fact, they have leaders. There are leaders who command lots of Klout and run grouplets on Twitter where everybody retweets them and agrees with them. But he's right that leaders who tend to be anonymous on social media never get accountability and therefore don't get trust and further responsibility.

I keep thinking of how in Russia, the bloggers and activists are all naming their names -- Kashin or Navalny or Udaltsov, Sobchak or Chirikova -- that has always been the hallmark of Russian protest movements and by contrast, the Bolsheviks had revolutionary nicknames like Lenin and Stalin and committed a lot of acts anonymously and secretly. In the Middle East and Asia, there is more of a tendency to have pseudonyms, because evidently the oppression is far greater, but it sets up a cycle of lack of accountability.

Well, Alec Ross and I are not going to agree about these things. But hopefully he will become more honest about admitting the role of elites like himself. At their most benign, they have outsized influence. At their worst, they are hijacking social media and amplifying their political agenda with it, and using the ban/mute/delete functions to silence dissent.

09/06/2012

Ok, you've heard all the reasons why you shouldn't invest in Facebook, the over-valuation of the stock, the information hidden from investors, the fat VCs getting their cut early and other investors having to queue up to sell, etc. etc.

To Mr. Zuckerberg, regulatory and legal threats miss the point.
"Facebook was not originally created to be a company," he wrote in the
company's public offering documents. "It was built to accomplish a
social mission—to make the world more open and connected."

There's a number of bad things about this.

There's the obvious attempt to shirk responsibility for regulations by implying Facebook has a high social mission -- regulations like privacy policy monitoring -- "a Federal Trade Commission settlement last year that calls for the government to audit Facebook's privacy policies for 20 years," says the WSJ. Good! this is why you want government regulation of rapacious social media platforms in the interest of civil rights. "Progressives" and the libertarians that ape them can't get their heads around this obvious fact -- the government is not the problem; even corporations aren't so much the problem; unethical hackers are the problem.

And this gets me to the other bad thing about what Zuckerberg is saying here, which is actually worse -- because I think the privacy thing is really over-stated (because if you don't want your privacy violated, you yourself can decide not to put crap on Facebook).

And that bad thing is that he sees that Facebook isn't a company -- it's not a business, that should have rules, regulations, a charter, fiscal responsibility, a board of directors, company policies -- all those things that go into making an institution. It's not a company, that would have to think of things like "the customer is always right" or at least make sure that it doesn't kill off the customer or harm those that are addicted users.

Instead, Facebook is a revolutionary movement -- something with a social mission. Bolsheviks, really, because they wanted this social mission to be fast, radical, everywhere, and to their advantage.

Remember how Facebook the non-company social-mission got started? It was called The Face Book and it was about putting up faces of women in a "hot or not" pair for men to rate them -- a sophomoric thing that Zuckerberg conceived as a college student. It wasn't really about connecting, it was more about ogling and hating.

Making the world more open and connected? Well, who gets to decide what opens and connects? It should be the user -- and again, I think the user has to take more responsibility for this. But the company is doing a lot of opening and connecting, too, by shoving into your view people you might like to friend -- friends of friends -- without any awareness, of course, that these may be your enemies...

And, open and connected is a good thing? For what purpose? Can we prove that if people are more open and connected that they kill each other less? Are you sure about that?

While admittedly extreme cases, some people are so open and connected that disconnected social misfits without a date though they may be, they can concoct fantasies of mass murder based on MMORPGs and movies like Batman, order ammunition online, and go on a murderous shooting spree.

To me, the trouble really begins with this revolutionary cadre stuff, the Better World notions. Who says these people should make Better Worlds?! They are like revolutionary movements, grabbing VC cash, grabbing the attention of the masses, and creating these hollow structures that burn up like the Burning Man...

The sooner all these platforms drop their "social mission" notions the better. They strike to be more useful and neutral and let users pursue their social missions with them, rather than trying to weld their oppressive social missions into the tools themselves.

Say, I wonder if those schools in Newark, NJ that got a large gift from Zuckerberg for educational innovation got that gift in the form of stocks or actual cash?

The libertarian author at WSJ, L. Gordon Crovitz, unfortunately, doesn't see the Bolshevik problem inherent in the quote he cited from Zuckerberg, and focuses on "the individual and the state":

The best way for Facebook to fend off regulations is to be more
transparent about how it uses data and to give users easier controls
over privacy settings. The company could be more explicit about its
offers of new services in exchange for expanded access to personal
information. Above all, letting people determine their own trade-offs is
in the spirit of the Internet more than the alterative of
one-size-fits-all rulings by regulators or judges.

No. The best way for Facebook to be brought in line is for it to face 20 years of monitoring by the FCC, just like video games or television. That's ok and that's a good thing. That's what liberal governments do, they monitor media to see that it does not cause public harm. Facebook isn't special.

The libertarian and the "progressive" wants Facebook to voluntarily be "more transparent" but it won't do that. It can't do that, because it can't make money then as a social-mission non-business.

University of Central Florida assistant professor Jayan Thomas, in collaboration with Carnegie Mellon University Associate Professor Rongchao Jin, has developed
a new material based on gold nanoparticles smaller than 2 nanometers,
in a regime between atoms and nanoparticles called nanoclusters.

Thomas and his team found that nanoclusters developed by adding atoms
in a sequential manner could provide interesting new optical properties
that make them suitable for creating surfaces that would diffuse laser
beams of high energy.

More reason to listen to Kid Mercury from avc.com comments and horde gold, eh?

Thomas is also exploring the use of these particles in the polymer
material used for 3D telepresence to make it more sensitive to light. If
successful, it can take current polymers a step closer to developing real time 3D telepresence.

3D-Telepresence, aka the holodeck, would provide a holographic
illusion to a viewer who is present in another location by giving that
person a 360-degree view (in 3D) of everything that’s going on. It’s a
step beyond 3-D and is expected to revolutionize the way people see
television and in how they participate in activities around the world.
For example, by allowing a viewer to “walk around” a remote location as
if in a virtual game, a surgeon could help execute a complicated medical
procedure from thousands of miles away.

The holodeck has different meanings to different people -- where did it originate? But in Second Life, it's only a thing within the virtual world, not the virtual world itself. It's a scene-caster that goes to 250 meters and rezzes out scenes, like, oh, Japanese homes or Wild West saloons for RP, and then at a click of the mouse, folds everything up or changes to another scene.

You know, this sounds expensive. I don't see it happening any time soon. The reason i-phones took off is that people can control them. They stay small, in the palm of your hand. The immersive virtual world on the big desktop computer didn't take off because people don't avatarize well and virtualize, it makes them uncomfortable. And don't forget how people never liked those virtual-world goggles that made them dizzy, too.

I'm really not so sure people are going to like having their real world space made into a virtual world, but maybe controllable parts like wall screens or flat surfaces with touch screens or something.

That is, I can see that robot that comes with the Skype call coming along before the gold particles start reflecting holograms and holodecks...